Rapid developments in mobile communication technology provide ubiquitous network connectivity. With evolving communication devices such as smart phones; demand for content viewing on the communication devices is growing exponentially. In today's highly competitive telecommunication industry, providing rich and satisfying user experience is a challenging task for network operators and service providers. Thus, service providers are keen on focusing their efforts towards providing value added services with the content viewing service provided to a user on his/her mobile communication device. Convergence of content viewing and communication enables the service provider to provide an immersive experience to the user. For example, chatting with a group of friends while the group enjoys watching same match live on their respective smart phones.
Existing methods provide standard and non-standard enablers for distribution of multimedia for content viewing and communication. However, content viewing and communication are mostly deployed as silos and are mostly based on interfaces independent of each other. This independent deployment is a hurdle for providing integration of content viewing and communication. Currently, whenever the user desires to communicate with other users in context of the content being viewed on his/her mobile communication device; generally, the user explicitly provides the context of the content being viewed. This fails to provide an immersive feeling in context of the content being viewed simultaneously by multiple users on their respective communication devices.
However, the service provider delivering the content to the user is aware of the user context with reference to content being viewed by the user. Currently, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has identified requirements of the Immersive Social Centre (ISC) enabler to include requirements for enhancing user experience with value added features to provide immersive (being their-being with) experience. These value added features include enabling multiple communication devices identified as a group to simultaneously organize a content viewing session and a communication session to enable integration of content viewing and communication session in the group with reference to the content being viewed.
Providing efficient methods to meet the requirements of the ISC enabler for integration of content viewing and communication to enhance user experience and effectively improve service penetrations will be appreciated.